#function

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more. ↗

— J.M.G. Le Clézio

#function #literature #purpose #words #age

Government has a legitimate function, but the private sector has one too, and it is superior. In other words, people are better than institutions. ↗

— Cal Thomas

#function #government #in other words #institutions #legitimate

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#function #god #influence #nature #prayer

Global warming is by its very nature a threat, but it is a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain's alarm. It leaves us sleeping in a burning bed. ↗

— Dan Gilbert

#climate-messaging #cognitive-functioning #dan-gilbert #global-warming #change

No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice. ↗

— Carolina De Robertis

#dysfunctional-families #family

Loss of social standing is an ever-present threat for individuals whose social acceptance is based on behavioral traits rather than unconditional human value. ↗

— Melissa V. Harris-Perry

#forgiveness #humanism #shame #forgiveness

We covered this around Year Three, Bill: that you're the Master of Space and Time and I'm a spastic Pomeranian. ↗

— Tracy Letts

#family

I'm just learning who I am and how relationships work and how to make them function. No different from anyone else. ↗

— Drew Barrymore

#anyone #different #else #function #how

Filibusters have proliferated because under current rules just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop a vote; senators are rarely asked to pull all-nighters like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' ↗

— Evan Bayh

#because #current #determined #enough #filibuster

In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred. ↗

— Michael Behe

#biological #biology #black #box #cell